Ah, another of the firsts for granddaughter. Her tooth – bottom one was “all wiggly” and she just “pushed it and it popped out”. Which was better than her dad who used to mess with them from the moment one felt loose. He’d go at it for three or four days sometimes. Anyway, I didn’t do a follow-up to see for sure the tooth fairy visited, but the tooth was cleaned and safely placed into a pouch. I’m also not entirely clear if it was to be transferred to underneath the pillow or the swap made in the pouch. As I posted before, the whole Santa Claus/Easter Bunny/Tooth Fairy business is part of parenting and without an older sibling to burst the bubble, it can go on for a while.

Oh, and the first real haircut recently occurred too. The lovey curls are still in place; the mass is simply reduced to a more manageable state. This was apparently granddaughter’s request. When I was young I always wanted long hair, but for reasons I never understood – more likely didn’t want to understand –  my mother was absolutely opposed. We finally reached the point of letting my hair grow out with all the attendant messiness of the stages that don’t look so good. Growing up in the era of girls ironing their hair was interesting, but without so much as a hint of curl, that was never an issue for me.Having it long did also get rid of the home permanent.ordeal. With only one bathroom and five people in the house, there were quite a few shampoos accomplished in the kitchen sink. That was also in the days of the bonnet hair dryer. I’m not sure who came up with the first blow dryer, but I hope they weren’t in a company where your inventions belong to the company.

Anyway, back to the topic of first – Kindergarten is coming up soon and even though at least the first few months will be virtual, it will be a new experience.

Many of you who follow this blog helped me out last week when “Deadly Doubloons” was up for a vote with Tale Flick, an entertainment company that provides a service of a catalogue where authors can post their books. This company has links with many movie and television producers and they run contests for people to vote on one particular book they would like to see made into a movie or television series. Deadly Doubloons was up against 39 other books last week. The winner received 7,304 votes, four times more than the previous contest winner. Even though I certainly was not in that league, Deadly Doubloons is in the catalogue. As I said in the Facebook post when I thanked everyone for their help, some producer may get the idea one day of doing a scuba adventure and there I’ll be for him/her to look at. In the process of vetting the book for the catalogue, one of the analysts compared it to, “The Deep” meets “Lara Croft, Tomb Raider”. Not quite the description I would use, but I’m not a Hollywood type.

Anyway, during some back and forth of Facebook posts, someone asked if the book was available on Audible. This question has been posed before and the sad answer is “No”. Despite what seems to be an explosion of audible books, in reality, it makes up about 20% of “readership”. Considering the millions of books, that’s still a large number. The “sad” part of the answer is the actual cost of converting a book to audible format. It runs about $3,000. If you decide to publish only on audible (as some do), that’s similar to the cost of publishing with a physical copy and e-book. The issue for me of course is I would have to convert. Hubby and I have talked about trying one to see and we still might. At the moment, however, the economic impact of COVID-19 on family, friends, local small businesses, and non-profits we support is having to take priority. We’ll see what the future brings.

In the on-going attempts to learn what all the features are on my Escape and how to use them, we did master the Memory Control for the driver’s seat. This is a feature we’ve never had before and it is nice. You can actually set it to remember three different drivers, but since the only other one who will use it is our son and that’s only for a few days each year, we probably won’t program his preference. The setting are for the seat, not the mirrors so those have to be adjusted each time. I accidentally discovered something yesterday that may well bring a chuckle to anyone this applies to. Okay, most Ford vehicles have the gas tank filler on the driver’s side. I realize this, but for some reason I will occasionally forget and either pull up on the wrong side or stop the vehicle before I get to the pump and check. As it turns out, there is a little indicator as one of the dash lights. There is a pump image and the handle for the pump shows it being to the left on the driver’s side. How clever is that? I hadn’t noticed it before and certainly wouldn’t have thought to look for something like that in the thick owner’s manual.

I also noticed while I don’t there are no cup holders in the pockets of the driver and passenger side doors, there is a slight recess that will steady a water bottle. The only drawback to the cup holders in the back seat is they are in the fold down console of the middle seat. Those door pockets also have spots for water bottles, but it does leave out whoever is sitting in the middle seat. We don’t have that very often though so I guess we can mange. It will be interesting to see what I discover next.

There is actually a short article about this that may or may not get published in the paper (not every article makes it into the limited space per week). As so many of us look to staying in touch without traveling and unable to meet in large groups, the phrases, “Facebook Live”, “Zoom”, “Face Time”, “Whats Up” have been added to “Skype”, “Videoconferencing,” and who knows how many I’m missing. Some of us are old enough to remember the early video-teleconferences with the odd lags between transmissions. While it was “cutting edge” at the time, it was still awkward.

We had Skype for a period of time on our computers and I’m not certain of why that fell out of favor. I didn’t (and don’t) use Facetime that much on the phone, however, I do now have the What’s Up App since that allows me to engage with those who have something other than an I-phone. Zoom is what has become immensely popular and as with other technology, I can manage only a few of the functions available. Part of the popularity is the free version so literally anyone with a computer can participate. Ideal is to have a camera so you can be part of the video piece, but you can be on with only audio as well (an advantage over Skype). Apparently a large number of people can participate at the same time as long as the “host” has the paid service which is reasonably priced. If no one has a paid service I think there’s a maximum of 40 minutes allowed. Anyway, with the on-going prohibition against groups of more than ten gathering for meetings, most of the local organizations have adapted to Zoom. I’ve been hoping we won’t have to do this for Homestead Center for the Arts, but we may have no choice. An issue though is we have quite a few people who either don’t have computers or who are not comfortable with them. There is a chance we can do some sort of hybrid set-up since we usually don’t have more than about ten who attend the regular meetings who are also not comfortable with Zoom. It will be interesting to see how we work this out.

My attempts to actually learn all the gadgets/features of my new Escape continue. On the plus side of what I like, I think I have successfully set the “Memory Seat” function for me. Hubby hasn’t driven it yet, but once he does, we’ll see if we can set the one for him. There are three settings available. The only other person who drives it is Dustin during their annual Dec/Jan visit so I doubt we’ll bother with that for him. Oh, and the middle seat in back is child-approved. Granddaughter should be comfortable in it although she’s had a growth spurt so I think she’s over the height where the special seat is required.

It has taken a bit to become accustomed to the screen mounted on the dash and I am now comfortable with setting the navigation system. The hands-free telephone is nice, too. In fact, there’s a hands-free text function that I’m not entirely sure of yet even though Hubby showed me how it worked on his truck. The text appears on the screen and then the voice asks if you want to respond to the text. If you answer “yes”, it somehow sends it. (I’m not going to try to figure that out).

However, something I didn’t realize and didn’t think to look for is there’s no CD player. The reason is there’s an audio function that allows you to do everything through the phone. I haven’t tackled this yet, because except for long trips I don’t use a CD. Hubby does listen to audio books during his commutes and has it all figured out. Rather than subscribe to one of the services though, he gets his audio books from the library download service. And no, I haven’t the faintest idea of how to do that either. I will tackle it at some point before too long.